Machines order information to either accelerate or slow and compress or extend a particular aspect of space and time. Whether they are ‘husbandry’, ‘mechanical’, 'electro-mechanical' or ‘neurological’, when machines are choreographed in sequence they tend to produce sufficient information to generate an output to which we employ tools to make these outputs more familiar to us. These two aspects of aggregation form the “real-estate” that grant us access to phenomena which conspire out of space & time.
Performative media are nodes in a neurological machine that contribute to its ‘fabric’: a materiality “woven” from partial fragments into a recognisable whole. They are important operatives that do more than traditional media which simply inform and describe, they accomplish an ‘act’ through the process of their design configuration, or to put another way, they order information to conduct a performance through their arrangement of components and parts by way of a monad. I suspect when artifacts interrelate and transform the interests of an array of actor-networks and agents through performative media, it might need to be assessed and audited by expression of a monad so that we may reliably observe it as having made something happen - (though I’m not altogether certain of this statement).
The Monad is associated with 17th Century physicist Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz where he remarked of the ‘monad’ as being like an “atom-of nature” that contains within itself a reflection of the whole world. When not expressed in such philosophical terms such as when it applies to category theory, a monad is a ‘functor’ that is a type of function “interrogator” able to order parts corresponding with components expressed as a function of their compositional imperative. I also think that the monad might be to performative-media what a sentence is to speech. Where sentences are parsed in combination with grammar and propositional logic and the type of role a forensic-storyteller would perform, performative-media is parsed in part by category theory and possibly set theory and would signify the type of role performed by a forensic-wrangler - (but I’m not certain of this statement yet either).
Monads like sentences capture a state-of-being, of-affairs and of-facts. Though where there are probably an infinite number of sentence combinations that describe the human condition and phenomena more broadly, there may only be a finite number of monads which capture human states of being. Indeed there could for instance be 8 to 80 thousand individual and identifiable human states, 2 to 20 thousand that we may be capable of recording for a dog or cat for example and despite estimation of 30,000 apple varieties they might only express 150 to 200 discrete states and fewer than 20 for simple celled organisms - but I’m still just guessing. Instrumental in obtaining the texture of a neurological fabric will I think be brought to bear from validation of a state that the monad signifies in an effort to have the most applicable and appropriate performative media in the right place, in the correct order, approximating the most accurate state-of-being and meaning at the right time.
In schools children are taught and supported on how to structure a sentence to write and essay. In the not to distant future I think that students will be supported with rehearsing how to compose monads in order to choreograph performative-media for ‘the machine’. Every drive for optimisation signals the end of one and the beginning of another societal epoch, and the drive to improve literacy in the working classes from the 1840’s to about 1993 in the UK, was in part in response to requiring workers to interface with increasingly complex instruction-sets of machinery and materials. I think what’s happened since the mid 1990’s is that migration away from mainly mechanical machines to progressively neurological versions of systems and “the machine” have caused gaps to appear in the fabric of ‘the machine’.
There are several reasons why events have unfolded in this way and caused gaps to appear but as a result and in employment terms specifically, these ‘gaps’ represent spaces where knowledge, historically, would have been filled by a parent passing skills to their child or filled by a craft-person transferring techniques on to an apprentice. In these gaps, created by so many under-developed neurological nodes - our children, programmers write code for machines to fill knowledge gaps in the fabric. In other words, programmers act like parent to machines that they code and 21st Century machines are indeed corporate children. The principle difference today in terms of education and work is the relationship components and parts have to production. In the 19th Century, factory owners employed people to work alongside steam powered machines. 20th Century factories hired labour for jobs using electronic-machines and skills transitioned from the previous century to the next. Aside from the role of ‘operative’ tasked with synchronising parts of the machine, for this brief moment in history 21st Century children’s historical proximity with machines as a means of production has been largely suspended and replaced.
